BROWNOUT
Nightly brownouts in the Philippines always bring out
exchanges of horror stories and myths with female characters
in different states of mutilation.
At night, the light goes out.
Old men gather the remainders
of light with candles in their hands,
necklaces of garlic and talk of tales:
women in flowing white silk,
half-bodied matrons with a taste for the unborn,
mother-spirits who walk amongst us.
But you know better than search for horror in afterlife.
The living should only fear the living,
you whisper in my ear. The dead can't touch us.
So you begin to brave my contours,
looking for the quickest way in.
Candlelight landscapes my breasts.
Mosquitoes feast on your skin.
The room of walls watches, its mouth
wide open, our bodies in its throat.
My fingers spider around your beast,
but I am listening to ghost stories outside,
ghosts who have a body like mine,
not yours, never a thick one like yours.
I think of how my waist might just cleave
while you water it with your tongue,
How my tongue might just grow long, hairy,
coiling and splitting at the tip
to taste you, slurp you inside,
until you find yourself in my waters.
So this is how it begins: these last hours of my womb,
the conception of fear.
LUNAR ECLIPSE
"We don't know how many people were on each ship."
-A navy spokesman on the collision of a container ship and an inter-island ferry in Manila Bay (1994).
The sun at night.
You hope to see nothing
with your eyelids fallen.
Around you, bones of earth are revealed,
sap of wood like blood, leaks.
What you don't see, you smell.
So fearful, everything, everything.
A walk midstream.
An open space. Nothing here is hidden.
Do you wish to float?
Do you wish to walk on water?
Mama...
Bodies, the stones of sea, steadily float,
skin reminiscing what once was water full of life.
Flesh smells like the insides of air,
once opened in the rain.
Thirst, impossible.
You are so afraid, always so.
The waves fall facing away from you,
ripping one child then his mother, water midstream.
The moon at night.
SINGAPORE SUNDAY
In memoriam, Mrs. Flor Contemplacion, 1953-1995
We smooth the Church courtyard
with a blanket of fried fish,
salted eggs, rice flattened in Tupperware.
No chopsticks, we say. Our mouths
long for the feel of forks and spoons.
Paper plates swiftly tumble with the wind
but only our eyes chase after them.
We laugh at the thought
of smelling like fish once again.
We all smell of newly-washed plates.
Ants approach in hills of red.
I sweep them off with my fingers.
One woman looks at me, tells me,
my hands-as natural as brooms.
Suddenly, a shower of leaves.
Like rain, they escape from my fingers.
In our country, rain comes in shape of leaves.
How quickly rain disappears here
through unclogged sewers.
The feel of week-old floods is unknown.
I edge away from the group and rest
a month's worth of letters on my lap.
Leaning against a tree, I read one.
The voice of my husband waits in my ear.
A flood of breeze turns green.
Now, I don't think of Mondays.
Flor Contemplacion was hanged in Singapore City for killing a fellow Filipino maid and a Singaporean boy. Many Filipinos believe that she was framed and accuse the Philippine government of not doing enough to help her.
SULTAN KUDARAT
"Powerful is not he who knocks the other down, indeed
powerful is he who controls himself in a fit of anger."
from the hadith, a collection of sayings
by the prophet Muhammad.
Legend is a memory that arises from simple truths,
a white cloak and century-old swords
for the next communion with skin.
We are tired now, old. There is barely food here to nourish
our legends, no lands to carry the weight of water and seeds.
There is no fish. In an island without them, the air
we breathe is not the same. Look around: empty forests,
burnt mosques, cracked and discolored arches.
The odor of guns and grease, abandoned flesh.
Our children are lost too, as much as yours, although
you may not know. We gave them prophets' names
we tried so hard to remember. Now that they are gone,
our legends have passed with them, unlike the names
of your people, taken after each country that took your hand,
from every mouth that drooled over your skin.
Your cathedral bells ring in this island where they don't belong.
Much do not belong here: our fates, our plight, and these bells
that echo the screams of those buried underneath the marble floors,
those sunk in soil that is not ours anymore.
We are not about temples and mosques.
Silent prayers hardly keep the day. Each time you kneel
to pray, we kneel to touch our graves,
these stones through which you planted crosses so deep
they clogged the open mouths of our dead.
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